Wednesday, 27 July 2011

Not to be confused with the
idiot Lord who thinks the euro
is a success

I've just listened to an excellent Five Live Breakfast interview with Nigel Farage, Lord Liddel (Labour) and someone called Chalres Kennedy who isn't a drunken failure of a Scottish politician, he runs a record label. The record label is called "Invisible Hand", presumably after Jean Monnet's "invisible hand" approach to imposing EU government on an unwilling population by doing it as secretly as possible.

Here are some of the best quotes from the interview:

Liddel "The euro itself has been a spectacular success"

He was being serious!

Farage "You are in receipt of an EU pension"Liddel "No I'm not"Farage "You will be in a couple of years"Liddel "Nigel, you yourself are in receipt of a salary from the EU"

The difference being that Lord Liddel (like Nick Clegg) is obliged to promote the EU or he will lose his EU pension. Nigel Farage, on the other hand, will never receive a penny from his EU pension because he's devoted his life to trying to bring the whole corrupt organisation down.

Liddel "Could I also correct something that Nigel Farage said because I don't think people should be allowed to get away with factual inaccuracies. He says that the eurosceptic party almost won the Finnish election. In fact they only got 21%."Farage "Yeah and the winners. What did the winners get Roger? The winners got 1% more. They came within 1% of winning the general election"Liddel "The the the the the Finnish government is a coalition of parties"Farage "When will you stop lying to people? There is a huge rebellion taking place across the north of Europe"

Labour came within 7% of winning the 2010 general election and finished 6% ahead of the Lib Dems. Does this mean that Labour didn't come second in the election because of the ConDem coalition?

Caller "If this isn't a dictatorship then why have we, the British people, not been allowed a referendum?"Farage "Quite right"

dic·ta·tor·ship [dik-tey-ter-ship, dik-tey-]
–noun
absolute, imperious, or overbearing power or control

Liddel "We voted 2 to 1 in 1975 in favour of membership"Caller "We did not vote for this. We did not vote for this dictatorship."Liddel "It's not a dictatorship"Caller "I'm a 55 year old woman and I would get on the streets and fight to get rid of this"

I'm 33 and I've never had a vote on the EU and the EU didn't even exist in 1975. Nobody has had a vote on membership of a political union.

Caller "I hate the dictatorship, I hate the freeloading MEPs, all the little niggly things, all these stupid laws they bring in. You can't have so much jelly on a pork pie. What the hell has it got to do with them what I want to put into my body?"Presenter "Charles Kennedy, why is it a good thing?"Charles "Because um ... because er ...er"Caller "Have I blown your legs off? Am I talking common sense?"Charles "No well I er, I haven't heard a specific example of why it's bad actually"

Apart from the specific examples that the caller just gave you?

Farage "The English should be recognised as a country, we need an English Parliament, we need a new relationship with Scotland and Wales, we need to stop massive open border immigration"

Is this a proper devolved English Parliament to put England on an equal footing with the rest of the UK or is it the same British Grand Committee of British MPs elected in British constituencies in England that UKIP has previously incorrectly called an English Parliament? If it's the former then this is great news - the opposition to devolution and fascist enforced Britishness policies are the only black marks in what is otherwise the most common sense manifesto of any political party in the country. If it's the latter then Farage really needs to stop misleading people - if he believes in the anti-devolution policy and thinks that people will support it then there's no need to mislead them into thinking it's something else.

The 1997 Group is a group for UKIP members who believe that UKIP should support devolution.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Monday, 25 July 2011

It's been largely ignored by the media but the BNP have had a leadership election and Nick Griffin has today been declared the winner by a margin of just 9 votes.

Griffin was opposed by Andrew Brons, the BNP's other MEP.

The tiny margin is interesting but the most interesting thing about the leadership election is the number of votes - only 2,305 ballot papers were returned which would suggest that the active/interested membership of the BNP is about the same as the number of people living in the same housing estate as me.

It's widely believed that the next stop for Brons is the English Democrats who have been actively recruiting BNP members lately. Recruiting Brons will drive a great many members away from the English Democrats but both the de jure and de facto leaders of the English Democrats, Robin Tilbrook and Steve Uncles, are owed a lot of money by their party and an MEP's expenses will go some way to helping them recoup some of their losses.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

The people of the UK were promised a referendum on any major EU treaty changes. They were also promised that the government would, in future, ensure that they put the UK first in all dealings with the EU.

Now there are major treaty changes, and unanimous support required to get the Euro out of its current hole. Will the government put the UK first and get us the best deal? or will the government roll over and simply give away whatever negotiating capital we have?

So after endless "Euro is no business of the UK, cos we ain't in it" we get "We must help the Euro because the Eurozone is critical to UK interests" we are back to "Treaty changes for the Euro are none of our business because it doesn't affect the UK".

UKIP should be taking centre stage saying "There was only ever one way to avoid this Euro disaster. That was for the currency never to have been created. Now... who has been saying that all along? Oh yes! UKIP."

If it is in UK's interest to protect itself by protecting the Economies of all European nations, then it was our governments responsiblity to have prevented the introduction of the Euro in the first place. LibLabCon all failed in this, which is why we are now here.

Blair is still in favour of the UK joining the Euro, Clegg and Cameron call for more EU/Eurozone political integration - what drives their tunnel vision, that they can only see 'More EU' as the answer to everything? Anyone would think they didn't consider themselves competent to run the UK as an independent country, that they only saw themselves as middle managers in the EU organisation.

About the author:Paul Perrin wants to make the UK the best place on earth to live - starting with Brighton. To help bring this about he has been a UKIP candidate in national and local elections.Paul writes a blog at Free People of England and tweets as @pperrin

Thursday, 21 July 2011

Wealthy champagne socialist and europhile, Lord Digby Jones, has warned that the UK should do whatever it takes to save the euro.

I make this shit up as I go along you know?

He claims that 40% of UK exports are to the EU and asks if the eurozone collapses, who would we trade with? The answer to that question is pretty simple really: we would continue to do the majority of our trade with the rest of the world as we currently do.

The 40% figure is a dodgy statistic made up by the British government to con people into believing that our economy relies on the EU. They do this through a mixture of counting goods that are shipped to Rotterdam to be transferred onto a bigger ship to be sent elsewhere as exports to the EU and literally making things up. The real figure is closer to 25% and declining year on year. We import on average around £3.9bn moreper month than we export to the EU. That's about £47bn per year more that we spend in the EU than the EU spends in the UK.

So if the eurozone collapses and the euro bombs, what does that mean for us in the UK? It means we won't be able to sell as much to the EU because a weak euro would reduce their spending power - we sell in pounds and their euro wouldn't be worth as many pence as it is now. But it also means that when you buy something that's being sold in euro and you pay in pounds, you get more for your money because your pound will be worth a lot more than their euro. And as we buy much more from EU countries than we sell to them, the cheaper imports will benefit the economy more than if the eurozone kept its current spending power.

Three quarters of our trade is done with the rest of the world - primarily the US, China and the Commonwealth. The world's second largest economy, India, is in the Commonwealth. Mineral rich countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and other pacific nations are in the Commonwealth. The dominant producers of commodities like sugar and cocoa in the Caribbean are in the Commonwealth. Outside of the EU we can have free trade with the Commonwealth. Inside of the EU we can only trade with the Commonwealth on the EU's terms. UKIP policy is to establish a Commonwealth Free Trade Area to compliment the European Free Trade Area that we would also join which is closer to what the country voted for in the EEC referendum in the 70s. And if you think that there's a chance the EU would refuse to allow the UK to join EFTA out of spite, remember that we buy more off them - they need us more than we need them, they can't afford to lose the UK market.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Working on the principle that rich investors become rich by knowing where to invest their money, taking a look at the performance of bonds issued by eurozone countries gives a valuable insight into their economies.

Government bonds are like loans - investors effectively loan governments money by buying bonds which can be turned back into cash with a guaranteed amount of interest (the "yield") after a certain amount of time. There is, of course, the ever-present risk that said government might find itself in dire financial straits and will default on the repayment of bonds when they mature.

Generally speaking, the risk of a government defaulting on bonds is tiny because if they need money they raise taxes or print more money (quantative easing). But there is only so much money you can print before your currency becomes worthless and it costs a month's wages to buy a toilet roll like has happened in Zimbabwe and there is only so much people will pay in taxes before they start wondering what their leader's head would look like on a spike on the walls of that lovely big palace they live in.

Sometimes countries have no choice but to default on bond repayments because there simply isn't enough money to pay them - a situation Greece finds itself in now. And it's because of these occasional defaults that investors expect a higher or lower yield on the bonds they are buying to reflect the higher or lower risk of not getting their money back. This is no different to what happens in high street banks and just as there are credit reference agencies deciding on the credit worthiness of you and I, so there are credit reference agencies that decide the credit worthiness of countries and their bleak outlook on the economies of eurozone countries has lead to an EU proposal to censor them.

Using the information that the likes of Moody's and Standard & Poor produce and their own gut instincts, institutional investors offer to buy a certain amount of bonds at government bond auctions with a specific yield (interest rate). The higher the yield, the higher the risk these people think there is of the country not being able to pay their bills and defaulting or of having to print so much money that they will devalue their currency so much that the bonds are worth less than they paid for them. In the eurozone, countries can't just print their own money or devalue their currency because they're locked into the Franco-German controlled monetary union so a higher yield on a eurozone country's bonds is mostly based on their perceived ability to pay.

Ok, lesson over. How are things looking on the European bond market? Let's kick Greece while it's down: Angela Merkel is trying to play down hopes of a miraculous cure for Greece's financial problems and investors clearly agree - investors are asking for an average of 28% yields on 10 year bonds according to Trading Economics. That means that for every million pounds the Greek government raises selling 10 year bonds, in 10 years' time they will have to pay back the original millon pounds plus £280,000. Greece raised about €20bn by selling bonds at the start of last year - if it tried to raise that amount of money again at current prices, they'd be faced with a bill for €5.6bn in interest alone as well as the original €20bn sale price of the bond.

But it's not just Greece. If you take a look at the big increases in yields over the last year, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain top the list. The UK and Norway have seen small decreases in the cost of borrowing and Switzerland has seen a very small increase - the UK is of course outside of the eurozone and Norway and Switzerland are outside of the EU altogether. In fact, other than Austria, Sweden, Poland and the Czech Republic, the cost of borrowing has gone up across the eurozone while costs have decreased outside of it. Belgium is high on the list of countries seeing the cost of borrowing increase by almost a third over the year and apparently presenting a higher risk to investors than, amongst others, serial bankrupt Japan and Thailand which is rumoured to be on the brink of another military coup.

If the bond markets are anything to go by, Italy is going to leapfrog Spain and be the next eurozone economy to fail. That's certainly the fear the EU has at the moment - they held a meeting a few days ago to talk about a possible default in Italy. Unfortunately for the people living in eurozone countries, there is no way out of the downward spiral into bankruptcy while they are tied into the EU's single currency.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Wednesday, 13 July 2011

The EU Commission is planning changes to the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) after finally admitting its abject failure.

We're saved!

The CFP was supposed to conserve fish stocks but the reverse is true - millions of tons of fish that are caught are thrown back into the water dead because fishermen are fined for any catch over their quota with no option to use up part of a previous or future quota instead.

The EU's plan now is to "decentralise" fishing quotas by centrally setting national quotas in Brussels to be administered regionally in member states. There's nothing like simplicity and this is nothing like simplicity. It's also nothing like decentralisation. The EU will still be setting quotas centrally, the only difference is that the quotas will be administered through unelected regional quangos rather than elected national governments and fishermen will only be able to trade their quotas to fishermen in the same country rather than any other EU country.

So we're going from an immoral, wasteful system of quotas decided by Brussels that benefits the Spaniards to an immoral, wasteful system of quotas decided by Brussels that benefits the Spaniards and is administered by unelected regional quangos. I'm sure our fishermen will be dancing in the streets, their jobs are saved.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

The RMT union is launching a legal action against the British government over its decision to award the German company, Siemens, a train building contract that has resulted in their English competitor, Bombardier, cutting 1,400 jobs.

RMT's case revolves around the fact that the British government didn't give any sort of preference to Bombardier or do anything to protect jobs in England.

It's good to see the unions take a break from whinging about public sector workers having to share some of the pain of budget cuts and redundancies with private sector workers but their legal action is futile. Under EU law it is illegal for the British government to give preferential treatment to people or companies in this country over people or companies in the EU. They would be breaking the law that their masters on the continent have passed down by doing anything protect our interests, save jobs or keep taxpayers money in this country.

So yeah, good luck RMT and let's hope the media give as much attention to the failure as they have to this announcement.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

The rabidly europhile Polish government says its 6 month presidency of the EU will be marked by a vigorous promotion of a more united Europe and an attempt to drum up enthusiasm for the failing political project.

The Poles are loving all the money they're getting from the EU and the right to move away from their relatively poor country and live and work in relatively rich EU countries and as such opinion polls have support for the EU in Poland as high as 80%. Little wonder when they are a net receiver of EU money (our taxes) and can live and work in the UK (despite the fact we don't have enough jobs and houses to go around the people already living here) and claim benefits for the children they have left at home.

The Polish government will be aided and abetted by the President of the EU Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, who is also a rabidly europhile Pole.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Sunday, 10 July 2011

The EU Commission is planning a crackdown on the international credit rating agencies after they downgraded Portugal's credit rating the other day.

By dropping a country's credit rating, it makes it more expensive for that country to raise money through selling bonds. Government bonds are basically promises to pay a certain amount of money on a certain date - it's effectively a government asking for a loan without any monthly repayments.

The lower a country's credit rating, the higher the amount of interest investors will want because there's a higher risk they won't get paid. It's just like when you take out a credit card - they have a headline interest rate that you will get if your credit rating is good but if it's bad you'll end up paying a higher rate. And if your credit rating is awful then you have to go to the kind of high risk lender that advertises on low budget satellite TV channels.

A country's credit rating doesn't matter so much unless it's trying to raise money from selling bonds, like eurozone countries are right now. The downgrading of Portugal's credit rating a few days before it was due to issue billions of pounds worth of new bonds will cost the Portuguese government a lot of money. Instead of paying €1.04 for every €1 of bonds they sold two years ago, they're now going to have to pay at least €1.11. It's only 7 cents but if Portugal issues €5bn in 10 year bonds, they will have to find €5.55bn when they mature in 2021. They haven't got €5bn now, it's a big risk to assume that they're going to have €5.55bn in 10 years time.

Obviously the amount of money eurozone countries have to pay to borrow money, the less chance there is the euro can be saved so in desperation the EU Commission is preparing new laws to stop international credit rating agencies from giving bad news about EU countries. As with many new laws that come from the EU, this one is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening in the real world.

It seems strange there is not a single rating agency coming from Europe. It shows there may be some bias in the markets when it comes to the evaluation of the specific issues of Europe.- Emperor Barroso, President of the Imperial Commission

Fitch Ratings and Fitch Solutions, as well as Algorithmics, a leader in enterprise risk management solutions, are part of the Fitch Group. The Fitch Group is a majority-owned subsidiary of Fimalac, S.A., headquartered in Paris, France.(Source)

Far from helping eurozone countries, this will increase the risk of investing in government bonds from EU countries. If they can't get accurate information about the risk of an investment then investors will steer clear of eurozone bonds or demand even higher interest rates to protect themselves from unknown risks.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Thursday, 7 July 2011

March 2011: Cameron rejected a call for the people to be given an EU in/out referendum

I think we are better off inside the EU but making changes to ithttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12689607

June 2011: Miliband rejected a call for the people to be given an EU in/out referendum

Mr Miliband does not believe that a ­referendum on UK membership of the EU is appropriate at this timehttp://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/253507/Ed-Miliband-rules-out-referendum-on-EU

The next EU (European Union) elections are in 2014, the next UK general election is 2015 - a year later.

Imagine if going in to the 2015 general election the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats had no MEPs (European Union MPs) at all! No incoming government could ignore such a message from us, the UK public.

So I have a cunning plan:

UK MEP's have no real power (All UK MEPs added together only make up 15% of the EU parliament - about the same as Lib-Dems used to get in the UK!).

So...

Love UKIP? Great! Vote UKIP.

Hate UKIP? So what? UK will be out of the EU in a matter of months after the election and will have no MEPs of any party! So vote UKIP anyway.

If any EU sceptic has any reason to not vote UKIP in the 2014 EU elections - lets get it out in the open and address it. This opportunity for removing LibLabCon from the EU parliament is too important to miss.

About the author:Paul Perrin wants to make the UK the best place on earth to live - starting with Brighton. To help bring this about he has been a UKIP candidate in national and local elections.Paul writes a blog at Free People of England and tweets as @pperrin

There must have been a huge sigh of relief at the Express offices last night when Downing Street churned out some propaganda that they could spin into a Cast Iron Guarantee™ from Cast Iron Dave on the EU.

Cameron has promised to negotiate a new relationship between the UK and the EU and claw back power from the EU. He says that with the collapse of the euro, the eurozone members will have to get even closer politically and that can be used to negotiate a looser relationship.

Setting aside the fact that a promise from Camoron is utterly worthless, the key word is "negotiate". Giving power away to the EU can be done unilaterally, taking it back requires the unanimous agreement of every member state and that's not going to happen. To forcibly take it back would require a government with some backbone rather than this bunch of europhile quislings in Westminster.

There will be opportunities for Britain to maximise what we want in terms of our engagement with Europe.

Who is this "we" Dave? Most of us want to leave the EU, we want nothing more than free trade which is what the country voted for all those years ago. Somehow I don't think that's going to be on the agenda is it?

I got us out of the bailout mechanism, which has been used repeatedly and from 2013 cannot be used again, so I think I exacted a good and fair price for Britain.

2013? 2013! How many more bailouts will there have been by 2013? Greece has had 2 bailouts in two years, Portugal is on its way to a second bailout and Ireland is only treading water thanks to an extra bailout direct from the UK. And we'll still be paying into the bailouts via the IMF. We shouldn't have paid a penny into propping up a foreign currency, especially one that has been doomed since its inception.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Wednesday, 6 July 2011

Portugal is now on a par with the Phillipines, Macedonia and Egypt and has a lower credit rating than Barbados, Latvia and Estonia. Even the Isle of Man has a better credit rating than Portugal and their main exports are students and Jeremy Clarkson (and he's not even Manx).

The euro house of cards is collapsing. Greece has been bailed out and it's about to be bailed out again. Greece's credit rating with Standard & Poor's is CCC - only 3 lower credit ratings exist, two of which are for bankrupts and defaulters. Portugal is only 5 rungs up the ladder from Greece, hovering precariously above Albania and Mongolia.

Despite the spin and false optimism from the europhiles, be under no illusions that this is not a disaster for the eurozone. Major eurozone economies are failing, their bonds downgraded to junk status and the cost of the loans they have to take out to pay for existing debt spiralling out of control. The eurozone is bankrupt, its only assets are France, Germany and the Netherlands and even they can't afford to bail out half of Europe year after year.

The best thing the Greeks and Portuguese can do is ditch the euro, devalue their currency, slash interest rates and lower taxes. In the case of Greece, they should default on their debt repayments - they literally can't afford to make the interest payments, the EU/IMF bailout is just a payday loan.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

The British government has confirmed that its interpretation (ie. gold plating) of an EU directive on gender bias in insurance will prevent insurance companies from taking gender into account when calculating insurance premiums.

Part of me says good because I'm a man and it irritates me that despite being only two years younger than my wife, both with a clean licence and no accidents in the last x number of years, I still have to pay more for my car insurance than she does and I've had a licence for longer.

But mostly I think this is a bloody stupid idea because insurance isn't based on gender, age, disability, race or any of the other -ists, it's based on risk. Like it or not, statistically women are lower risk drivers than men. Young drivers are high risk than older drivers and disabled people are also higher risk. Premiums are therefore loaded according to the risk taken on by the insurance company - the less chance there is of them having to pay out on a claim for you, the cheaper your insurance and that's entirely fair even if it means that women get cheaper car insurance than men.

The cost to the insurance companies will be passed on to consumers. The premiums for men won't come down (or at least not significantly), they will be increased for women and the insurance companies will simply make more money. If they are forced to equalise prices for men and women then they will just load another category that it's not illegal to weight premiums on such as age or disability. Until someone complains about age discrimination and then we'll all end up subsidising 17 year olds in Subaru Impreza's.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

The wise and benevolent EU has decided that it's unacceptable that mobile phone companies charge extra for roaming between EU countries. After all, you don't pay roaming charges between states in the USA do you so who should you pay in the United States of Europe?

Mobile phone companies make a lot of money from roaming charges and it's that money that helps them give away £400 phones for free when you take out a contract. Nobody likes paying extra charges but it's a fair compromise - the small minority that use their phones abroad on a regular basis pay the extra cost of using it rather than the majority of mobile phone users subsidising their usage.

In Europe it's as common for people to go to a neighbouring EU country as it is for English people to go to Wales or Scotland but they are still in the minority. It's not as common in the UK and Ireland though, thanks in part to the EU's environmental laws that make it prohibitively expensive to travel by air but mostly because we're an island and it's not convenient.

The mobile phone companies won't absorb the extra costs, they will pass them on to all their customers. We will all pay higher bills to subsidise the mobile phone usage of a minority of customers and in the UK and Ireland we will benefit the least. The EU is not a country, the countries in it are not states in a country like the USA despite the EU's insistence on referring to them as "states" to try and get people to think about them in the same way. It is not unreasonable to expect to pay a premium for using your mobile phone in a different country.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Monday, 4 July 2011

A letter from Eric Pickles to David Cameron has been leaked claiming that up to 20,000 people could be made homeless and another 20,000 forced to move if the ConDems go ahead with plans to cap benefits at £500 per week.

Erm, £200 per week? £2,000+ per month (£24,000 per year) tax free for not working and people might not be able to live on it? What sort of lifestyle does someone have to live to be able to spend more than £500 per week without any of the expense of going to work? The median average wage in the UK is £499 per week and 32% of that goes to the taxman in Income Tax and National Insurance to pay people not to work. If someone working full time and earning the national average wage can survive on ~£388 per week after tax, why can't an unemployed person manage on 25% more than that?

The problem here isn't the amount of benefits someone gets paid, it's the amount of people on benefits. Iain Duncan Smith's laughable plea to companies to employ young people from this country rather than cheap immigrants last week shows that he understands the problem but of course the British government's hands are tied because of the EU.

Cheap foreign labour is abundant because anyone from an EU member state is allowed to come and live and work here. Average wages in some eastern European countries are 20% of what they are here so it pays to move over here, send money home and you can even claim benefits for the family you've left behind at our expense. And then there's non-EU immigration which we aren't allowed to cap because the EU said it was illegal.

Giving money away for not working isn't the answer. People need jobs so they can support themselves without needing a big chunk of everyone else's wages to pay their bills. There are 2.5m unemployed people in the UK at the moment and 400,000 jobs were created in the last year. That should have taken the unemployment figure down to 2.1m and saved the taxpayer a good £8bn off the social security bill. With that extra money in peoples' pockets they could have been spending more and stimulating the economy which creates more jobs but instead 87% of those jobs were taken by immigrants leaving the unemployment rate largely unchanged.

Cheap foreign labour might seem like a good idea to businesses but it's a false economy. The more unemployed people there are, the more tax the British government needs to pay for them. The more tax employees pay, the more employers have to pay. The more money the British government needs, the more tax it will attempt to extract from companies.

UKIP policy is to freeze all economic immigration for 5 years and then introduce a points-based system to ensure we only get immigrants with skills that we need. This doesn't affect genuine asylum seekers who would continue to be allowed into the country to protect them from danger in their own country. A 5 year freeze on immigration would allow people already living here to take up the available jobs that are mostly going to immigrants and to house people who already live here. There aren't enough jobs or houses to go around the people who already live in this country, we don't need immigration.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Sunday, 3 July 2011

Thursday's Expressclaims that two Tory cabinet members and a raft of Tory MPs are coming out in opposition to the EU and may even vote for UKIP in the next election.

Which is nice but let's just remember that despite the flirting with Farage and carrying the occasional UKIP advert, the Express is still a Tory rag and they will make a story out of nothing to help the Conservatives. The Express is using UKIP to try and force Cameron's hand but it's nothing more than a staring contest. If Cameron blinks first the Express can claim victory and they'll drop UKIP like a hot potato. If Cameron doesn't blink at all (well, cyborgs don't need to blink do they?) then the Express will spin some non-story into a stand against the EU, claim victory and drop UKIP like a hot potato.

Let's be very clear about this: there is no rebellion in the Tory Party on the subject of the EU. There is no call from cabinet members to leave the EU. There is no group of Tory MPs calling for their party to negotiate our independence from the EU. Tory MPs will not be voting for UKIP in an election. If Tory MPs were genuinely eurosceptic they wouldn't be voting UKIP in an election, they would be defecting and bringing down the europhile ConDem government. The Conservative Party is pro-EU, a policy that is fully supported by its MPs and MEPs.

And what was Downing Street's response to all this? A reaffirmation of the British government's policy of ever closer union whilst trying to reform the unreformable. Leaving the EU is "not the government's policy".

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.

Friday, 1 July 2011

Once again I have to defend myself against the de facto leader of the English Democrats, Steve Uncles.

Some time ago Uncles wrote a letter to Sinn Féin offering to change English Democrats policy (that's how policies are made in the EDP - Steve Uncles comes up with some batshit idea and hey presto it's policy) to one of kicking Northern Ireland out of the UK and forcing them into unification with the Republic of Ireland in return for a bribe from Sinn Féin for his bankrupt party.

Naturally, Sinn Féin ignored him as he and his party are both non-entities and even convicted terrorists have some standards when it comes to dealing with lowlifes.

But as part of his fascist campaign against Northern Ireland, Uncles started a Facebook page called "Campaign to get Northern Ireland out of the UK". I wanted to make sure everyone who came across it knew who was behind the page so I posted the following comment on the wall of the page:

This page is the work of Steve Uncles of the English Democrats who wrote to Sinn Féin offering to adopt a policy of uniting NI with the Republic of Ireland in return for them bankrolling his party. There's not a lot Uncles won't do to get his £26,241 back from the party which isn't surprising given that they are so heavily in debt and still got beaten by the Monster Raving Loony Party not long ago.

Steve Uncles doesn't speak for England, most English people wouldn't force a nation of 2m people to join another country against their will in return for a bribe from the political wing of a terrorist organisation.

As users of Facebook will know, before you can post a comment on the wall of a page you have to "like" it. Which I did for as long as it took me to post the comment and then I immediately clicked the "unlike" link and removed myself from the page, leaving the comment exposing this terrorist-appeasing lowlife on the wall.

Predictably, the comment was soon taken off the wall of the Facebook page by Uncles but in order to try and damage my reputation, he has taken a screenshot of his status update showing me "liking" the page so I could post the comment and posted it on his English Passport blog without telling people that I only did it to post the above comment on the wall which he has deleted and telling them that I support his fascist campaign.

And of course he has mentioned the fact that I am in UKIP (which he tried to defect to this year but was knocked back) and the Campaign for an English Parliament (which he got thrown out of this year for bringing the campaign into disrepute) to try and damage their reputations with his lies as well.

Here is the comment I posted in response to Uncles' libel on his English Passport blog which he still hasn't approved (and probably never will because he's a dishonest little turd):

And here is a screenshot of the wall of the Victims of Steve Uncles page on Facebook posted straight after I commented on Uncles' page:

So will Steve Uncles, the lying, fascist, terrorist-appeasing lowlife failure be man enough to admit that he has deliberately mislead people and libelled me? A complaint has been made to Wordpress about the libel Steve Uncles has made in contravention of their Terms of Service and an email will be sent off to his attack poodle, the ineffectual "technically" leader of the English Democrats (and practising solicitor) Robin Tilbrook who I assume is Uncles' personal solicitor as he is the one who makes all the threats and complaints against anyone who criticises the terrorist-appeaser nowadays.

About the author:Stuart Parr is a UKIP parish councillor for the Brookside ward of Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council in Telford & Wrekin and the founder and administrator of Bloggers4UKIP.Stuart writes a personal blog Wonko's World and tweets as @wonkotsane.